The general rule of thumb is that most new businesses fail. But the incubator model is beginning to change those statistics for companies who seek the right kind of help. Perhaps the most famous metric of entrepreneurship is the business survival rate. Figures like eight of 10 startups don't last the first year are widely cited and certainly have shock value. But incubators appear to be changing those outcomes.

Two top lawmakers on small business matters renewed calls for tougher enforcement of the rules in a program that steers government contracts to the socially and economically disadvantaged. Some wealthy entrepreneurs have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts reserved for the disadvantaged by repeatedly qualifying for the one-time program

Midwestern colleges (Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, S. Dakota, Ohio for examples) launch campuses built on public-private collaboration. A recent explosion of "innovation" campuses -- many in the Midwest and almost all involving fancy new buildings and partnerships between public colleges and private corporations – have ironically un-innovative names.

Community colleges, long the under-loved stepchildren of American higher education, still don't get the dollars of their four-year counterparts, but they're standing very much in the spotlight these days. President Barack Obama made them the focus last week when he unveiled his proposed budget at a Northern Virginia community college. The president joked he'd been to campus so often that he's only three credits shy of graduating.

Although for-profit colleges received more than half of the $563-million in Department of Defense tuition assistance paid to active-duty service members in the 2011 fiscal year, "it is unclear whether the revenues translate into meaningful educational benefits for military students." Notably, the report singles out Bridgepoint Education's Ashford University, which is based in Iowa the home state of Sen. Tom Harkin,